"In retrospect," Evers said, "doing that 424 times (once for each public school district in Wisconsin) was just ridiculous."

That alone is a persuasive case for the type of standards review Wisconsin initiated more than a decade ago, which eventually led the state to join up with the federal Common Core State Standards. Common Core is an ambitious effort to raise U.S. education standards and make them significantly more uniform from place to place.

Common Core does not set curricula; decisions about what to teach and how to teach it remain, as they absolutely must, controlled at the local level. But it does set expectations for what students will learn and when, which amounts to a valuable and necessary overhaul of a patchwork system.

In Wisconsin, employers have cheered the effort for the simple reason that they want to know that a high school graduate from a rural Northwoods district graduated with roughly the same proficiencies as a high school graduate from an urban district in the south of the state or a small-city district in central Wisconsin. And there are major benefits to students, too, especially the increasing number who move at some point (or points) during their schooling, who will be less likely to find themselves missing entire concepts in their classes because they got out of order.

At a public hearing in Wausau last week, a number of opponents of the standards spoke out against what they perceive as a federal intrusion into community schools. We understand the anxiety around a major overhaul that is affecting local classrooms. But we don't see much merit in calls for reversing Wisconsin's adoption of the standards, which Evers called the "lynchpin" of other beneficial Wisconsin reforms like school report cards, teacher evaluations and more.

If broad regional disparities were a problem within Wisconsin, then the same principle applies for the U.S. as a whole. And in an increasingly competitive global world, we need to set high standards and work very hard to help our students meet them.

At the moment, the importance of Common Core State Standards is well understood by educators and administrators, many of whom are strong advocates for the changes, and by a group of passionate opponents. But Common Core might not be well understood by the public at large.

If you have kids in school, or even if you don't, it would pay to learn about the standards and what the real-world impact will be in local schools. We'd invite local school districts to redouble efforts to let the community know about what Common Core will mean here.

We are in a time of transformation in education, as new technologies and innovative teaching models are making their way into students' lives. We are optimistic about many of the changes, and many are driven by Common Core State Standards.

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Common Core will help tie schools together: Our View

In an interview last week with the Daily Herald Media Editorial Board, state education Superintendent Tony Evers talked about a time in Wisconsin when every school, every year 'got groups of people

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